The origins of E-commerce can be traced back to early direct marketing to customers by phone (“telemarketing”), and to T.V. commercials that advertised products that could be purchased from home by calling a phone number on the television screen, which eventually developed into half-hour or hour-long infomercials. However, the birth of the world-wide-web in the early 1990s provided even greater opportunities for e-commerce, and fostered the creation of the online retail giant Amazon.com®, and also the multinational online consumer-to-consumer auction provider eBay®. As technology breakthroughs occur, the opportunities for its application to further improve the electronic shopping experience continually evolve.
Many bricks and mortar clothing retailers now have websites that permit viewing of their products in each of the available colors, and additionally list the available sizes. There are also many inventions that have sought to further improve the online marketing of retail products by seeking to add particular enhancements to the virtual experience. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,307,568 to Rom for “Virtual Dressing over the Internet” teaches “a system for displaying garments . . . as though the garments were being draped over the body of a user,” by fitting “articles of clothing to an image of a user,” using “a picture of the user” and “critical points” that are “taken from the image of the user, and are used to adjust the spatial configuration of the clothing.” In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 7,149,665 to Feld teaches that “Virtual two-dimensional patterns representing different portions of the wear article are assembled into a virtual three-dimensional wear article,” and furthermore teaches that a “material type is associated with one or more of the virtual patterns and the virtual three-dimensional wear article,” permitting “the virtual wear article to stretch, flex, sag, etc., on the virtual model to better approximate the real-life fit and look of the wear article on an object during design of the wear article.”
The present invention seeks to dramatically improve the realism of the virtual shopping experience beyond these and other inventions.